Free Bone Valley by Claire Matturro Page B

phosphate!”
    Go, Angus, go, I thought, latent cheerleader instincts surfacing in me. Then I looked over at Mrs. Moody, who stood tall and held her formerly fine face straight ahead. I don’t know, but if I were her, bodyguard or not, I’d slip out the door and go home.
    And just in case the crowd was not already riled up, Angus rallied it by his retelling of the Boogie Bog debacle. As a result of the company’s bankruptcy, huge phosphogypsum stacks—such as the one in which M. David was forcibly and against his will drowned—were left at the Boogie Bog site for the state to clean up. These gyp ponds contained millions of gallons of toxic sludge retained behind those earthen dams, which were at high risk of breaking or overflowing.
    I leaned over to Josey. “Is that all true?”
    “You don’t read the newspaper much, do you?”
    “Okay, I’m real busy. I’m a lawyer. I have to read tons for my clients. Sometimes I miss stuff in the papers.”
    “Yes,” Josey said. “It’s true. It’ll cost the state of Florida millions to clean up the site, that is, if the DEP can even figure out how to do it. Early estimate is around a hundred and sixty million. Right now, they’re talking about transporting the sludge by way of barges and dumping it out in the Gulf of Mexico.”
    “That’s totally insane,” I said.
    “Yeah. Isn’t it, though? The DEP will treat the sludge as best they can before they dump it, but it’ll still be a risk to the entire Gulf of Mexico and the marine life and the coral reefs. The fishermen are up in arms about the plan. But if the state leaves the gyp stacks like they are, they pose a worse threat. If the stacks overflow during our summer rains, the path of least resistance will be to take that poisonous sludge, untreated, straight into Bishop Harbor and then into Tampa Bay. Where we know for certain it will kill off the sea grasses and marine life, destroying the bay. God help us if a hurricane hits one of those gyp stacks.”
    Appalled by the catch-22, I nodded.
    “It’s like nuclear waste,” Josey said. “There’s nothing you can do with that gyp waste that won’t hurt something.”
    Okay, Josey knew her stuff. I needed to introduce her to Olivia, let them preach to each other’s choir. Maybe I ought to listen more closely too. After all, Florida was my adopted home state. Okay, Lilly Belle, memo to internal file: Learn more about Boogie Bog, Antheus, and, actually, you know, start listening to Olivia. Oh, and actually read the whole newspaper once in a while.
    Having thus chastised myself for my ignorance, I nodded thoughtfully at Josey, but then the angry increase in volume from Angus at the podium made me turn back to him.
    “Let those Antheus people think long and hard about what M. David’s body in that gyp pond means,” he said. “There’s a message there to those who would wreak similar havoc in this county.”
    Oh, not good, not good at all, I thought. Championing violence is not a desirable trait in a client I was defending, even if his case was just stupid orange libel. I waved my hands frantically at Angus. But before he saw me, Josey pulled out her steno pad and started jabbing down little notes.
    Angus kept talking in a threatening way. Desperate to shut him up, I kicked over a folding metal chair in front of me, and the clatter drew everybody’s attention. In the ensuing break, I saw Miguel grab Angus and physically pull him away.
    After wrenching Angus’s arm and whispering something in his face, Miguel took the stage, introduced himself, and apologized for the disorder. Angus stomped off out of my line of vision.
    Miguel, in all his regal male beauty, talked peace and love and patience and petition signing, no doubt as an attempted antidote to Angus’s tirade. He did one of those love your enemy, but teach them the error of their ways with letters to the editor speeches. Sweet, I thought, but naively ineffective in today’s world; at least Josey didn’t